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Time is money and for entrepreneurs starting out, it is
imperative both are utilized to their fullest. To maximize both,
founders must prioritize.

When we first started out, we were wrestling with some problems
on how to build our personal-finance website, NerdWallet. I got some great
advice from my friend Drew Houston (the founder of Dropbox).

“It’s OK to have growing pains, as long as you’re prioritizing
correctly and working to address them. Every company looks messy
from the inside,” he told me.

Am I prioritizing correctly? There’s the rub.

When I was working on Wall Street, prioritization was dictated by
the situation. Compared to growing your own business,
prioritizing on a trading floor is easy, because you’re always
putting out fires but you know what the fires are.

1. Beware the seduction of task-based
lists. The elements of prioritization are simple:
Know what tasks need to be done and rank them in order of
priority. Stephen Covey of
7 Habits of Highly Effective People fame suggested
ranking tasks across four metrics: important/not important and
urgent/not urgent. Obviously, tasks both urgent and important go
first, issues not important or not urgent go last, and the rest
fall somewhere in between. You’ve got your list.

This is fine, so far as it goes, but the process can create a
sense a false sense of satisfaction: If I cross everything off
this list, will I have done my best work today? This might work
for middle managers at a mature company, but for a startup
entrepreneur this can be a Sisyphean exercise in futility. You’re
never going to finish that list and would waste time each day
revising it on the fly.

2. Focus solely on themes that will drive
growth. Of the 100 things that crowd the entrepreneurial
mind as things you “need to do,” about 98 will incrementally
improve your company -- but two have the potential for
exponential growth. Focus on those few, and the rest of your
niggling worries will take care of themselves.

A better way to think of prioritization is not tasks but themes.
What are the two or three principal things that will drive
growth? You really have to understand the key drivers of your
business and anything that doesn’t move those drivers isn’t a
high priority.

For example, in the early days of NerdWallet, a key driver was
getting the most amount of web traffic in the least amount of
time. That became a filter through which we sifted every task and
decision. If it didn’t meet this metric, it wasn’t a priority.

3. Forget perfectionism. Entrepreneurs are
often Type A overachievers. For us, it’s really hard to let
things go unfinished and not be perfect. But if you are serious
about prioritization, you need to be able to drop something in
midstream to focus on another task that has greater potential to
drive results.

It may feel counterintuitive, but in the rough-and-tumble drive
to start a company, perfectionism can be a problem. You have to
be willing to do things half way just to get more done with the
higher chances to yield strong results. And that isn’t easy for
high performers.

4. Do the hardest thing first.
Procrastination isn’t a species of laziness, it’s avoidance --
and we naturally avoid things we don’t want to do. Lloyd
Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, once said that the first
thing he does in the office each day is the task he dreads the
most. Whatever you don’t want to do, do it first, and it
eliminates the nagging dread that will sap energy away from other
tasks as you postpone the inevitable.

5. Don’t plug leaky boat holes -- switch
boats. If you’re spending your time spreading your
fingers and toes across leaks springing up through the hull of a
business venture, you may wish you had more feet and hands to
cover the deck.

But maybe the real problem is the boat itself.

As NerdWallet co-founder Tim Chen puts it: "Don't spend your time
plugging a leaky boat, spend your time switching boats.” Time
spent bailing is time taken away from adding more profitable
vessels to your fleet.

Prioritization pressure never goes away. If things are going well
in your business, something will always seem on fire. If you've
got things under control, that’s a big red flag -- it’s a sign
you are doing what is urgent, and not what is important.